Hyde, Orson. A timely warning to the people of England, of every sect and denomination, and to every individual into whose hands it may fall, by an elder of the church of Latter-day saints, (late from America.) Preston, 19th August, 1837. A. Charlwood, Printer; Orford-hill. [Norwich, 1847?]

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A Timely Warning is a revision of Orson Hyde’s A Prophetic Warning.  These publications are virtually identical for the first half of text.  But in the second half, A Timely Warning eliminates the more morbid events predicted for the last days and is less severe in condemning the sectarian clergy, even though it comments on their tendency to cry “false teachers” without examining the Latter–day Saints’ claims.  It also includes a reference to “the coming of the Son of Man, which will be witnessed by this generation”—one of the few instances in which a Mormon author speculates in print about the time of the Second Advent.  Unlike A Prophetic Warning, it clearly identifies itself as a Latter–day Saint tract.

This is a reprint of the 1840 Manchester edition.  It embodies all of the corrections incorporated in that edition and adds a number of improvements in punctuation and capitalization.  Otherwise it is textually the same as the 1839 (see this digital collection) and 1840 editions—except for a parenthetical insertion on page 6: “This work was first published in 1837.  We wish a discerning public to judge for themselves how far these predictions have been fulfilled.  Since that time thrones have been cast down; much blood has been shed; the seeds have rotted under the clods; pestilence has been, and is still raging in different parts of the world.”

Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church.  Volume One, 1830-1847. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, [1997]).  Item 332, p. 361–62.

Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University